Watercraft such as boats are typically transported from one site to another by means of portable trailers. Trailers are generally designed with a bed on which the boat will rest, and some form of winching system that is designed to move the boat and off the trailer. In most cases, trailers are designed such that the trailer and boat are backed down a slope so that the stern is placed in the body of water. The boat can then be unsecured from the bed and allowed to float off the trailer. The winching system can be designed, for example, to provide a cable that is unwound once the boat is in the water, such that the trailer can then be pulled back up the slope fully and removed from the water, leaving the boat behind. When convenient, the boat can then be disengaged from the winch upon which it is now completely separated from the trailer and is free floating. When extracting a boat from a body of water, the process is reversed. The winch system is used to engage the boat which is pulled towards the trailer, which is typically partially submerged so that the boat can be floated back onto the trailer bed.
One of the challenges in loading a boat onto a trailer is in achieving proper alignment such that the boat comes to rest in a position that is symmetrical with the trailer bed. Failure to do so can result in asymmetric loading of the trailer, which in turn can cause handling problems for the vehicle pulling the trailer. In addition, not having the boat placed squarely on the trailer runs the risk of the boat falling off the trailer. This can lead to damage of the boat, and more importantly, a particularly dangerous and potentially fatal situation should this happen during transport.
In order to assist a user loading a boat onto a trailer, many prior art trailers have include load guides to aid the person loading the boat in placing the boat in a portly aligned configuration as the boat is drawn up onto the trailer bed. Commonly used guides of this type are permanently mounted on either side of the trailer such that there is a few inches of clearance between the guides and the boat as it is being loaded. In use, the boat is allowed to bump back and forth between the guides as it is being hauled onto the trailer deck by the winching system.
A serious limitation in these permanently mounted guides is that by definition they increase the effective width of the trailer. Within North America, and in many countries around the world, vehicles and trailers are limited to certain maximum dimensions. In most North American jurisdictions, the maximum width for a trailer is 102 inches. As a result, permanent mounting of trailer guides on the outboard portion of a boat trailer by definition reduces the maximum width of the trailer deck and in turn limits the width of the boat that can be transported. This is especially problematic in the case of pontoon boats, which typically have widths of 96-102 inches. Thus, transporting a typical pontoon boat on a trailer with outboard guides would in many cases result in a transport configuration that would be in violation of the law.
One prior art solution to the problem posed by pontoon boats has been to provide a trailer with “inboard” guides, that is, guides that are positioned between the pontoons. While this solves the trailer width issue, it results in another problem that makes this a less than ideal solution. Guides spaced to be positioned between the pontoons when the boat is loaded on the deck must be short enough to fit between the pontoon tubes when it is on the trailer. As a result, when the trailer is backed into the water in order to load the boat, the guides will frequently be completely submerged and not visible to the operator performing the loading operation. In addition, even when not completely submerged the operator's ability to view the guides will be blocked by the boat itself as it is winched up onto the trailer deck.
Therefore, what is needed is a boat trailer system including guides that are visible when loading and unloading a boat, especially a pontoon boat, and which when the trailer is configured for transport do not cause the trailer to exceed the maximum allowable width for such units.